appearance for several years might be seen as a sign of the times and a worth-while, if minor, venture in philosophy in australia in its time.
Critical Thinking
Sam Butchart
The modern concept of ‘critical thinking’ as a goal of education derives from the work of the american pragmatist philosopher and educational theorist, John dewey (dewey 1933). The central idea is that educators should teach students how to think well for themselves, rather than simply teaching ‘facts and figures’. Students should be able to critically assess claims, beliefs, policies and arguments that they encounter, not just in academic contexts but in everyday life, the workplace and social and political contexts. The idea assumes that there are some general purpose, more or less context independent thinking skills and dispositions that can be taught, or at least encouraged.
The aim of producing ‘critical thinkers’ has been adopted by many curriculum authorities and universities in australasia. There is an explicit focus on the teach-ing of thinkteach-ing skills in the school curriculum frameworks of new Zealand, victoria, tasmania, South australia, Western australia and the northern territory. at the tertiary level, a majority of universities now include critical thinking in their lists of graduate attributes—the essential skills they aim to instil in their students.
Critical Thinking and Informal Logic
a necessary component of the ability to think critically about a claim or policy is the ability to assess the evidence or reasons which might count for or against it. For that reason, the ability to analyse, construct and evaluate arguments is often considered to be a core component of critical thinking (though not the only component; critical thinking also clearly requires certain dispositional traits or
‘habits of mind’—to actively seek out evidence for and against one’s own views, for example).
The goal of teaching critical thinking therefore overlaps to a significant extent with the goals of the informal logic movement. ‘informal logic’ is a term used to denote both a skill and an academic discipline. The skill is the ability to construct, analyse and evaluate real, natural language arguments—arguments as they are found in books, articles, newspapers, opinion pieces, essays, political speeches, public debates and so on. The academic discipline studies the theory of informal argument and how the skill can be taught and improved.
Critical Thinking
informal logic began to gain ground in the 1970s and arose from a perception that the standard introductory undergraduate course in symbolic logic is of very limited use as a practical tool for evaluating real arguments. Students themselves began to demand courses that were more relevant and applicable to the assessment of arguments concerning the political and social issues of the day. new courses and textbooks began to appear, emphasising ‘real-life’ arguments and attempting to provide new tools for their analysis and evaluation. Early examples of the new style of textbook are Kahane’s Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric (1971), Johnson and blair’s Logical Self-Defense (1977) and Michael Scriven’s Reasoning (1976).
These developments seem to have been rapidly adopted in australian and new Zealand universities. J. L. mackie, for example, was teaching a course in inform-al logic at the university of Sydney in the early 1960s, making use of the method of argument diagrams described below. as of this writing, undergraduate courses in critical thinking are taught in approximately 70% of philosophy departments in australian universities and in every philosophy department in new Zealand.
The teaching of elementary formal logic has not been abandoned—it is still considered by many to be an essential component of a philosophical education—
but this is now supplemented by critical thinking courses which are often explic-itly aimed at improving everyday, practical reasoning skills.
although the main figures in the development of informal logic and critical thinking are based in the u.S. and Canada, philosophers in australasia have made important contributions. in this article i will describe the contributions of three of the most influential: C. L. hamblin, Michael Scriven, and tim van Gelder.
C. L. Hamblin
Charles Leonard hamblin (1922–1985) was professor of philosophy at the University of New south Wales from 1955 until his death in 1985. apart from being one of australia’s first computer scientists (inventing, in the 1950s, the push-pop stack and one of the first computer programming languages), hamblin has been a major influence in the field of informal logic.
his book Fallacies (1970) anticipates many themes that were to emerge in informal logic. a fallacy is a common pattern or type of argument that, though often persuasive, is in fact unsound. Well known examples of fallacies include affirming the consequent, begging the question, argument ad hominem, illegitimate appeal to authority, and so on. The topic was introduced by aristotle and has been extended throughout the centuries. hamblin’s was the first ever book-length discussion of the fallacies and contains a scholarly and detailed history of the topic which remains unsurpassed to this day.
The book begins with some trenchant (and highly influential) criticisms of the then standard textbook discussions of fallacies, which are in hamblin’s view ‘as debased, wornout and dogmatic a treatment as could be imagined—
incredibly tradition-bound, yet lacking in logic and in historical sense alike, and almost without connection to anything else in modern logic’ (1970: 12).
Many of hamblin’s critiques have become widely accepted by the informal
Critical Thinking
logic community. hamblin noted that many of the fallacies are not obviously arguments at all; the fallacy of ‘appeal to force’, for example, or the fallacy of
‘many questions’, illustrated by questions such as ‘have you stopped beating your wife?’. More significantly, many so-called fallacies are not always bad arguments.
appeals to authority and arguments ad hominem are sometimes quite legitimate.
Standard treatments of the fallacies, hamblin argued, either fail to notice this or provide no guidance on distinguishing the invalid cases from the valid.
hamblin’s book is not merely critical, however. it also contains a substantial and influential positive component. hamblin went on to argue that, despite the failings of the standard account, the topic of fallacies nonetheless fills an important gap left open by formal logic. hamblin argued that what is required is an extended conception of argument, according to which ‘there are various criteria of worth of arguments; that they may conflict, and that arguments may conflict … all this sets the theory of arguments apart from Formal Logic and gives it an additional dimension’ (1970: 231). according to hamblin, there are aspects of argument appraisal that go beyond the standard set by formal deduc-tive logic. There may, for example, be good arguments both for and against a given conclusion. if so, then the ‘goodness’ of an argument cannot be simply identified with the standard of ‘soundness’—deductive validity combined with the truth of premises—for there cannot be two deductively sound arguments for a conclusion and its opposite. here hamblin anticipated a point that has now become widely accepted in the field of informal logic.
if formal deductive logic is not the whole story, what do we need to fill the gap?
hamblin argued for what he called a ‘dialectical’ conception of argument. The essential point is to recognise that arguments typically take place in the context of a dialogue (real or imagined) between two or more people, usually with differing views on the matter in question. This has several implications for informal logic.
For example, the idea that in a good argument the premises must be true should be abandoned. one reason is that truth is not sufficient; a person who argues from premises which are not known to be true, but are only true ‘by accident’
has not given a good argument. but requiring premises to be known to be true is too strong. instead, hamblin argued that the right criterion is dialectical; a good argument requires premises that are accepted by the parties to the dialogue. These themes and arguments have emerged again and again in the subsequent history of informal logic and critical thinking.
hamblin further developed his dialectical account of argument, introducing the idea of formal dialectic. he devised a variety of formal ‘dialogue-games’
to model argumentative dialogues. in hamblin’s games, players take turns to make moves such as making a statement, putting forward an argument, asking a question, or asking the other player to support one of their statements with an argument. Players build up a store of commitments with each move they make.
rules determine what moves are allowed and how the commitment store changes with each move. in recent years, these dialogue games have found applications in linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence, in areas such as natural
Critical Thinking
language processing and communication protocols for autonomous software agents.
Michael Scriven
Michael Scriven (b. 1928) was educated at the University of melbourne, attaining a b.a. in mathematics in 1948 and an M.a. in philosophy in 1950.
While at the university of Melbourne, he (like many others) was influenced in his thinking about formal and informal logic by d. a. t. Gasking, who taught there from 1946 until 1976. Scriven completed a d.Phil. in oxford in 1956 and joined the philosophy department at the university of California, berkeley in 1966, where he began teaching courses in Practical Logic and Practical Ethics.
From 1982 to 1989 he was professor of education at the University of Western australia, and he was professor of evaluation at the University of auckland in new Zealand from 2001 to 2004.
Scriven’s critical thinking textbook Reasoning (1976) is a classic and has served as a model for many of the textbooks that followed. Scriven eschews the use of formal logic entirely and proposes a seven-step procedure for understanding and evaluating real arguments: (1) clarification of meaning; (2) identification of conclusions; (3) portrayal of structure; (4) formulation of unstated assumptions;
(5) criticism of premises and inferences; (6) introduction of other relevant argu-ments, and (7) overall evaluation. With variations, this framework of analysis (steps 1–4) followed by evaluation (steps 5–7) has been reproduced in many textbooks.
There are several innovative features of Reasoning worth mentioning here. First, Scriven’s was one of the first textbooks to make use of argument map diagrams.
These diagrams are used to portray the global structure of an argument—the way in which premises, intermediate conclusions and the final conclusion all fit together. in these diagrams, each statement in the argument is written out and numbered, then arrows connecting the statements are drawn to represent the inferential relationships between them.
Scriven was not the first to make use of such diagrams—they appear, for example, in beardsley (1950) and toulmin (1958)—but he introduced some useful innovations, which are still often used today. he suggested writing out and numbering each statement of the argument in a seperate ‘dictionary’, then using just the numbers in the argument map diagram. unstated premises (assumptions) are labelled with a letter rather than a number, to distinguish them more clearly from the explicit premises of the argument. Scriven also introduced the idea of incorporating into the argument map statements that count against the conclusion, by labelling the numbers in the argument map with a ‘+’ or ‘-’ sign.
a second important feature of Scriven’s text is the extensive discussion of the process of formulating unstated premises or assumptions. Scriven adopts three criteria for inclusion of an unstated assumption in the analysis of an argument.
The assumption must be (1) strong enough to make the argument sound, (2) no stronger than it needs to be to make the argument sound, and (3) have at least
Critical Thinking
some relation to what the arguer would be likely to know or would believe to be true. With regard to (2) and (3) Scriven was one of the first authors to make explicit the role of the principle of charity in the identification of assumptions in arguments.
Since the publication of Reasoning, Scriven has continued to be involved with the theory and practice of critical thinking. he has published several articles on a variety of topics in the field and (with alec Fisher) a book on methods for evaluating critical thinking skills in students (Fisher and Scriven 1997).
Scriven’s interest in critical thinking led to an interest in the more general con-cept of evaluation—the process of coming to a reasoned conclusion about the merit or worth of something (products, processes, services, government and non-government programs, and so on). he has helped to found the field of Evaluation as a flourishing discipline in its own right, with its own academic journals and professional organisations (Scriven 1991).
Tim van Gelder
tim van Gelder (b. 1962) was educated at Geelong Grammar, the university of Melbourne (b.a. 1984), where he studied law, mathematics and philosophy, and the university of Pittsburgh (Ph.d. 1989). he taught at the philosophy department of indiana university until 1993, when he returned to australia as an australian research Council QEii research Fellow. From 1998 to 2005 he was principal fellow in the department of philosophy at the university of Melbourne, while working primarily for the private firm austhink, which he co-founded in 2000.
van Gelder’s early work in philosophy focussed on issues in the foundations of cognitive science. When he turned his attention to critical thinking, he proposed the Quality Practice hypothesis as a model of how critical thinking skills might be improved (van Gelder et al. 2004, 2005). This hypothesis states that critical thinking skills can only be improved by extensive deliberate practice—a concept based on research in cognitive science on how expertise is acquired in a variety of cognitive domains. deliberate practice must be motivated (the student should be deliberately practicing in order to improve their skills), guided (the student should have access to help about what to do next), scaffolded (in the early stages it should be impossible for the student to make certain kinds of mistake), and graduated (exercises gradually increase in difficulty and complexity). in addition, for practice to be effective, sufficient feedback must be provided.
With this in mind, van Gelder and colleagues at the university of Melbourne developed a critical thinking course based around computer assisted argument mapping exercises. Students are provided with exercises in which they have to create an argument map diagram, like those described above. van Gelder’s team developed computer software to assist students in the creation of these argument maps. text can be typed into boxes and edited, supporting premises can be added, deleted or moved around. Evaluations of the premises and inferences can also be incorporated into the diagram.
Critical Thinking
This argument mapping software (now known as Rationale and commercially available from the austhink organisation) is used to support extensive deliberate practice in applying argument analysis skills. Students are provided with a sequence of exercises of increasing difficulty in which they have to create a map of an argument. The software itself provides some of the scaffolding and guidance by building certain constraints into the kind of diagram that can be produced (for example, every argument must have one and only one main conclusion) and offering context-sensitive help. Feedback is supplied by tutors and model answers—pre-prepared argument maps to which students can compare their work (van Gelder 2001).
using this approach to teaching critical thinking, van Gelder and others at the university of Melbourne have achieved impressive results. over a single semester, twelve-week course, they have consistently recorded significant improvements in critical thinking, as measured by a standardised multiple-choice test, the California Critical Thinking Skills test (van Gelder et al. 2004). The software is now used for teaching critical thinking in dozens of universities and hundreds of schools in australia and world-wide. in 2001, van Gelder was awarded the australian Museum Eureka Prize for Critical Thinking, in recognition of this work.
Critical Thinking in Schools in Australasia
Moves to incorporate the explicit teaching of critical thinking skills in primary and secondary schools in australia and new Zealand are fairly recent. Where this has been done, the work of Edward de bono has been very influential. de bono’s ‘Cort’ (‘Cognitive research trust’) program of thinking lessons and his
‘Six Thinking hats’ scheme are widely used (de bono 1985, 1987).
Many academic philosophers in australasia have been involved in the teaching of critical thinking in schools through the ‘Philosophy in Schools’ program (Lipman 1987). in this approach, pupils are provided with a stimulus, such as a story, situation, film, television show or newspaper or magazine article. The stimulus is used to introduce a philosophical question (for example: What makes something fair or unfair? if you’re not good at something, does that mean you’re bad?) The teacher then guides pupils through a classroom discussion of the issues, encouraging them to provide reasons for opinions, and to distinguish good reasons from bad ones. The aim is to encourage and model a spirit of intellectual curiosity and fair-mindedness, and to inculcate the idea that opinions can and should be backed up by sound arguments.
Many schools in australasia use this approach to teaching critical thinking.
There are now associations for Philosophy in Schools in most states in australia, new Zealand and in Singapore. The Federation of australasian Philosophy in Schools associations (FaPSa) is a not-for-profit umbrella organisation, set up to promote philosophy teaching in schools and provide resources and training for teachers. it organises conferences and publishes the journal Critical and Creative Thinking.